Colorado wildfire: High Park Fire evacuees return home

"I said, 'Please, not ours.' But it had been."

Pat Baker surveys the burned-out remains of her house Friday afternoon in Rist Canyon near Davis Ranch and Desillio roads, west of Fort Collins. Baker's two-story house, where she had lived for 43 years, burned to the ground in the High Park fire.

When Pat Baker returned to her Rist Canyon home Friday, more than two weeks after the house she built with her then-husband Bob 43 years ago had been destroyed in the High Park Fire, the devastation was obvious.

Walking past the area that once held the archway under which her daughter Kim Baker Medina was married, through what was the studio where she crafted her own stained glass, the 72-year-old Baker held her hand over her mouth, clearly unsure of what to make of the scene before her.

But edging past the shards of what was once pottery made by her kids — amazingly, a cup etched with "Eric, 1983" on the bottom remained intact — and now strewn around a wheelbarrow with a sticker that reads "Well-behaved women rarely make history," Baker came upon what was left of the garden that surrounded her home.

A single Penstemon, amid the blackened destruction, was valiantly trying to green up.

"Look at these guys," Baker said with a smile. "They're saying, 'Yeah! We're going to come back.' I don't think they'll bloom this year, but next. ... When they're working on the house, they're going to have to step around my plants. Ha! That'll be a challenge."

There will indeed be a variety of challenges for Baker — even beyond the return of the Penstemons. As she walked, Baker Medina stood off to the side, giving an inventory of the home's contents to the family's insurance agent, Chris Frye. After a time, Frye would give the pair a check, but what amount of money could compare to decades of memories?

Advertisement

"That's going to be the hard part," said Baker Medina, who grew up in the house with seven siblings. "It was just chock-full of stuff, top to bottom. We used to joke, 'Who has to sit under the fern tree tonight?'

"But (Baker's) mother died when she was young and a lot of her stuff was in there and it means a lot to her. How do you replace her mom's sewing machine, the one that she made the quilt made out of all her old baby clothes on?"

But if there was anyone seemingly capable of handling the gut-wrenching situation, it's Baker. Still working fulltime as a math teacher at a private school in Fort Collins, there were times during the day when emotions threatened to overwhelm her, but invariably, usually in connection with some discussion of one of her beloved plants, there would be a laugh, a joke and an upbeat mind-set that, given the circumstances, made almost no sense at all.

And with it, there was the overwhelming sense that it was going to take more than one of the worst fires in Colorado history to keep her away.

"She's so wedded to this land," said Bob Baker, who found that out the hard way when Pat wouldn't leave to move with him to the Western Slope. "There's no question she'll be back — even if it's in a trailer."

Hope comes in waves

Driving out to the property, with Baker Medina occasionally reaching over from the steering wheel to hold her mother's hand, Baker talked about that connection. The 35-minute drive down winding roads to get to work is certainly far superior to sitting in the bumper-to-bumper city traffic down below, she said.

"I love this drive," she said. "I love the rocks, I love the slopes."

All along the road, homemade signs offered thanks to the firefighters who battled the High Park blaze the past three weeks — one reading, "I Wanna Marry a Firefighter."

Getting closer to the home, Baker Medina's car wheels passed other tragic stories: the man who moved from Hungary 50 years ago and was the first person to build in the canyon, now without a home; the guy who restored classic cars for a living — his home stood, but the garage, filled with vehicles from days past, destroyed; another family that had to suddenly evacuate their property while holding a wake for their matriarch, who had just passed on.

And yet, there were any number of homes that appeared completely immune to damage. Weeks later, the arbitrary nature of the fire, which started June 9 from a lightning strike, is still a source of both bewilderment and consternation with Baker and her family.

Left: A burned wheelbarrow sits near the remains of Pat Baker's home Friday afternoon in Rist Canyon, west of Fort Collins. Baker's two-story house burned to the ground in the High Park fire, which skipped past several outbuildings and missed her neighbor's house. Right: A metal hand pump stands near the home's foundation. (Photos by Andy Cross, The Denver Post)

"It's so random, so incredibly strange to look at," she said. "The house that's closest to me, the land burned on three sides of it, but the house stayed."

"There's another house, it's surrounded by pine trees," added Kim. "The trees stayed, but the house burned down."

The day the fire started, Baker was told there was a chance it could approach. Then she heard that it was moving in another direction. Then the winds shifted, and she was told her home was again in danger.

Baker's son, Ian, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University, pressed friends and associates for specific forecasts for the area and got some Google heat maps and satellite imagery that showed his mother's house was ensconced within a U-shaped safe haven.

Even so, the worrying continued.

"I mean, you have hope, and then you don't have hope," she said. "And then you have hope, and you don't have hope again. The winds were so swirly — they'd move one way and you thought you'd be OK and then they'd shift and slap you in the face."

Kim said she bolted upright in the early-morning hours of June 11.

"I just panicked," she said. "I just thought, 'The fire has reached the house.' I know that's when it happened. I woke up the next day and went straight to the computer and the U-shape had been completely filled in and I turned on the television, and they said they were about to announce the areas that had been hit.

"I said, 'Please, not ours.' But it had been."

Throughout the ordeal, Baker and her family had gone on the Internet to look at photos of fire-damaged homes, but the shots didn't prepare them for what they faced this past Thursday night.

"You think you know, but then you get here and it's still like a punch to the gut," said Ian, who for more than 15 years has tended to the 17 acres that surround his mother's home. "We walked the property, and it looked like a big lunar crater — there were maybe five trees with any green on them."

"A dirt-road girl"

Bob Baker said his ex-wife turned to gardening after their divorce, and there are pictures of the diminutive woman in her gardening attire highlighted by a pair of industrial strength roofer's kneepads, enforced with styrofoam inserts.

Eventually, Pat Baker became so adept that her work was featured in numerous publications. At one point, she said, the Denver Botanical Society even drove a tour bus up the mountain road to show off her garden to a group of aficionados.

Walking with a visitor, where she talks about the 35 species of allium — "That's onions, for common people," she joked — as well as all the other unique types of flowers and plants she's acquired from the assorted international societies to which she belongs, it's clear Bob Baker is right, that Pat isn't going anywhere.

Since the fire, Baker has lived with relatives, but she said she's growing eager for some space of her own where she can read — she hasn't owned a television for decades.

"She's going crazy, having to live in town," Baker Medina said.

"I've only lived on paved streets for eight years of my life; when I was in college and for graduate school," retorted Pat. "I'm a dirt-road girl."